Surveillance systems work as a scout for the geographical sites and assist governments and defense organization to maintain social control, recognize and monitor threats and further crucial in crime investigation. The surveillance systems are generally installed in sensitive areas such as market place, defense organization, educational and research institutes.
Typically, a surveillance system comprises a surveillance camera for capturing images of particular area under observation. Such surveillance systems capture continuous footage of the targeted locality. Such captured footage, for threat detection, requires continuous human analysis. Such analysis is tedious and typically involves cutting and stitching of the images according to sequence of events. Though, few tools such as VIRAT and HumanID are instrumental in chronological arrangement of events in the footage, mere chronological arrangement may not guarantee threat detection.
Moreover, traditional surveillance systems are configured to monitor predetermined targeted geographical sites. Considering, an event of interest for investigation or an action (policing, risk mitigation, defense operation, etc.) may occur at any arbitrary site, such surveillance of the predetermined targeted geographical sites more often results into unavailability of crucial information. Furthermore, an instantaneous nature of the action (policing, risk mitigation, defense operation, etc.), in certain events, would further require an intuitive correspondence of the event occurrence, threat identification, and action.
Hitherto, the surveillance systems are configured to detect threats based on limited event related information. Due to inappropriate processing of event related aspects, the present surveillance systems are believed to have poor probability of threat detection resulting in frequent false alarms which in turn putting unnecessary operational pressure on an action arm in the process. The system and method for reducing such frequent false alarms in the surveillance systems is still unaddressed in the art of the invention.
Though various surveillance systems are known to detect threat related to an event, however, emerging tools of information and intelligence gathering, e.g. social media posts, mobile captured and communication data that can be instantaneously utilized to build a rich context of the event for taking any decisive action are largely ignored in the art of the invention. Therefore, surveillance system known hitherto are primarily based on gathering intelligence through private network of professionals and installed surveillance tools. In spite of current equipment of citizens of personal sensory communication devices e.g. mobile phone, their participation in the surveillance activities is largely ignored. Hence, a system is required to facilitate either a voluntary or through a relevance based picking of citizens involvement in such participative surveillance.
In some of the prior art references certain aspects related to use of such information and intelligence gathering tools is disclosed, however, identification and integration of relevant participatory tools in a specific geography to augment healthy predictivity of threats associated with the events is still not precisely addressed. Accordingly, in a US20100245583 by Harel et al teaches mobile surveillance node adapted for capturing events of surrounding environment for threat detection, but, it doesn't discloses use of citizen participation in surveillance by participatory sensing mechanism.
In a Taiwanese patent application 200818916, Zhang Zhong et al teaches an user defined event based surveillance system that performs a wide area site based surveillance, but, it did not addressees integration of data received from a plurality of sources such as city soundscape, participatory videos and social network. Moreover, a concept of social network formation among sensory surveillance devices including cameras, audio recorders and other sensors are not disclosed.
Ashwin S et al. in “A J2ME-Based Wireless Automated Video Surveillance System Using Motion Detection Method” discloses a motion analysis based surveillance technique using a mobile phone. However, this scheme does not propose any participatory sensing mechanism as this is a standalone system where analytics happens at the phone.
Mohan M. Trivedi et al. in “Distributed Interactive Video Arrays for Event Capture and Enhanced Situational Awareness” discloses an architecture for event based recognition. However, this paper does not discloses about event based subscription using a messaging middleware and sharing of citizen's video in participatory mode.
Another drawback with conventional surveillance systems is that it does not consider audio analytics based city soundscape nor does it infers from social networking data as an extended and indirect tool for citizen participation in surveillance by participatory sensing mechanism.
Thus there exists a need to address the long standing problem of providing a method and system enabling comprehensive augmentation of conventional surveillance system for greater geographical data acquisition, participative surveillance and intuitive and automated alerting of threats.
These drawbacks can be overcome with the attendant features and advantages of the present invention.